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- [00:05]
A
Hi, I'm Santiago Ruiz, and this is Statecraft. Federal government's time to hire is almost triple that of the private sector. The government fires a way smaller percentage of its employees per year than the private sector. Often heads of agencies aren't allowed to look at the resumes of applicants for roles. How would you go about fixing all this? Today I'm talking to my economic historian friend, Judge Glock. He's the director of research at the Manhattan Institute. Judge works on a lot of topics, and if you enjoy this episode, I'd encourage you to read some of his work on housing markets and on the epa. There's a lot of good stuff there. But I wanted to corner him today to talk about civil service reform, how to get better talent into the government, how to get bad talent out, and how to do that all without blowing up the things that we value in the existing civil service system. Judge, thanks for joining.
- [00:52]
B
Thanks so much for having me, Santi.
- [00:54]
A
It's good to talk. So my rough roadmap for today is I want to talk about hiring and paying people in the government. You have a paper out recently about lessons for civil service reform from the states that we pay not enough attention to how this stuff works at the state level. So I want to do hiring, firing, maybe how we got here. Why is the civil service system in America the way it is today? And then I want to talk through the politics of all this stuff. Like how do you actually practically engage with this work, given that we're really polarized on a lot of the sub issues here?
- [01:28]
B
Sounds great.
- [01:30]
A
Cool. Why don't we start with your recent paper about lessons for civil service reform from the states? As I understand it, and I'll kick it to you, but the argument is basically that since roughly the 90s, both red and blue states have made a lot of big changes to how they hire and fire people. You want to talk through what those changes are?
- [01:48]
B
Yeah. So the reason I wrote this is that as someone who was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in the region and obviously heard a lot about civil service throughout my childhood and young adulthood, and also began to research it as an adult, I had known almost nothing about the state civil service systems. But when I began working a lot in the states, mainly across the kind of sun belt, a lot of times in Texas and Kansas and Arizona elsewhere, one of the things I was very surprised to learn is that their civil service systems were reformed to an extent that seemed absolutely radical from someone coming from the D.C. civil service background. The reforms in these states was Just incredibly radical relative to anything that was even being proposed at the federal level, let alone implement it. As you mentioned, starting the 1990s, you had several states that went to basically complete at will employment. That means there was no official civil service protections for any of the state employees. Now again, on the federal level, we're talking about very marginal changes to hiring and firing. That seems extreme. On the hiring level, you saw states where basically you had some state managers who could hire someone off the street, just frankly, like you could on the private sector. A manager met someone, say a coffee shop, they got to talking, they say, hey, I'm looking for exactly your role, why don't you come on board? They could basically do that in some of the states and again, the federal level with a very stultified hiring process that seemed kind of absurd to even suggest something like that. And then of course, you had states that basically got rid of any collective bargaining agreements with the state public employee unions. And you also had states that did a lot more, what's known as broadbanding for employee pay, a lot more discretion for managers to reward or penalize their employees, depending on their performance. So you had these four major reforms in these states that were, again, from the perspective of D.C. just incredibly radical. Literally nobody at the federal level that I saw was proposing anything approximating what has already been in place in the states for decades now. So one that just should be more commonly known and should frankly infiltrate the debate on civil service reform in D.C. a little bit more. But secondly, I think the interesting part is, even though the evidence on this is not absolutely airtight, on the whole, the evidence for these reforms have been positive. A lot of the evidence is about surveys and polling of managers and operators in these states asking how they think it works. They've generally been positive. And we just know the states that have done this are generally pretty well operating states. You know, places like Texas and Florida and Arizona generally rank well on kind of state capacity metrics in terms of cost of government time for permitting and other sort of issues. And finally, to me, the most surprising thing here is that there's an issue of the dog that didn't bark. The argument in the federal government against civil service reform is that if you do this, we will open up the gates of hell and return to the 19th century patronage system where spoils men come and go depending on different elected officials, and the government is overrun with political appointees who don't care about the civil service. And that has simply not happened. We have very few reports of any concrete examples of politicization. We have at the state level. At the state level, we have these surveys of the state employees and state managers who generally say they can almost never remember any example of political preferences influencing hiring or firing or so forth.
- [05:22]
A
There's one of the surveys you cited that thought was interesting where they ask, can you think of a time you've heard about, you know, whether, whether or not you've actually encountered it yourself? Can you think of a time someone said that they thought that the political preferences were a factor in civil service hiring and it was something like, you know, like 5%.
- [05:37]
B
Yeah, it was in that, that kind of 10 to 5% range. So it was very small. And frankly, I don't think you find a dissimilar sort of number of people who would say that even in an official civil service system, which we can get into more. But you know, politics is not completely excluded from even a formal civil service system. So anyway, you have these absolutely radical civil service reforms. You have generally positive outcomes. You have, as I mentioned in the paper, bipartisan support for a lot of these reforms in the states going back in the 1990s, and yet again, almost no discussion of how these lessons, these laboratories of democracy, the results of these, can be imported into D.C. and so I think there's a lot that can be done there. And I think when we're talking about how to reform the D.C. and Washington civil service system, we should first look at the examples of dates who've done it and import what works.
- [06:27]
A
Sure. You and I a few weeks ago talked to our mutual friend Don Moynihan, who's a scholar of public administration, and he's got a, I think, a more critical view of this. And for listeners, we had a really interesting conversation about the evidentiary base for this idea that like big civil service reform would be neutral to substantially positive at the federal level based on what we know, the states. And I thought that was a very interesting back and forth where basically one of your points is we don't have strong negative evidence of this stuff.
- [06:55]
B
That's kind of the first order.
- [06:56]
A
We don't have these case studies of productivity cratering in states that move to an at will employment system, et cetera. And we do have strong evidence that collective bargaining in the public sector is probably bad for productivity. And then I think what you guys would both agree on is the evidence specifically on the hiring and firing side is we could use more evidence, we could use better work than just the surveys that we have there is that a fair assessment of the evidentiary base?
- [07:21]
B
Yes, I think that's correct. As you mentioned, the evidence on collective bargaining is pretty close to universal in that this raises costs, it reduces the efficiency of government, and it has little to no positive upsides. So I think Don, to some extent, and definitely me and a lot of other researchers in this area would say, okay, in an ideal world we can get rid of collective bargaining. We should probably go ahead with that if we're concerned about the efficacy of government. Now, on the hiring and firing, you know, I mentioned a few studies. So there's this 2010 study that looks at HR managers in six states and finds generally positive outcomes in terms of their satisfaction with their civil service systems after reform and find very little to any evidence of politicization generally preferring the new system relative to the old system. There was a dissertation just two years ago that surveyed several employees and managers in civil service reform and non reform states. And across the board, the reform states, the app will employment states said they had better hiring, retention, productivity and so forth. And there's this 2002 study that looked at Texas, Florida and Georgia after their reforms and found almost universal approbation inside the civil service itself for these reforms. So, you know, this is not a randomized controlled trial or anything. This is not the highest standard of evidence. But I think that generally positive evidence should point us kind of directionally where we should go in civil service reform. We know we can at least try some things in this direction of loosening restrictions on discipline and firing, decentralized and hiring, so forth, and probably get some productivity benefits from it. And we can also know with some amount of confidence that the sky is not going to fall, which I think is a very important baseline assumption here. We can say with a fair amount of confidence that civil service is not going to collapse. If you go to at will employment, the civil service system will continue on and probably be fairly close to what it is today in terms of its political influence if you have decentralized hiring and at will employment and so forth.
- [09:34]
A
So as you point out, a lot of these reforms that have happened in, you know, 20 odd states since the 90s would be totally outside the overton window at the federal level. Just stepping back for a second, why is that? Like why is it so easy for Georgia in a bipartisan fashion in the 90s to move to at will employment and you can raise the topic at the federal level?
- [09:57]
B
It's a good question. I think a lot of people at the federal level thought a combination of the 1978 Civil Service Reform act, which was the Carter era act that tempted, at least in some reports, to do what these states hoped to do in the 1990s and the Clinton era, reinventing government initiative, that they would basically accomplish the same end. They would approach what happened in Georgia without the same extent of formal reform. And that didn't happen. And that was an era when the civil service reform was much more bipartisan. As you mentioned in Georgia, it was a Democratic governor, Zell Miller, who really pushed it. In a lot of these other states, they got buy in for both sides. The recent era of civil service reform at the state level really took place post the 2010 Republican wave in the states. And since that era, it's been much more Republican and. Or at least the reform impetus. And that meant it's been a lot harder to get by in from both sides in the federal level, which will be necessary to overcome a filibuster. So I think people know it has to be very bipartisan, and we're just kind of past the point, at least at the moment, when it can be bipartisan the federal level. But there are areas we can talk about where I think there's a fair amount of overlap between the two sides on what needs to happen, at least in the upper reaches of the civil service.
- [11:15]
A
It was really interesting to me, as I dug into some of your work on this stuff, just how bipartisan civil service reform has been at various times. I mean, you talked about the Civil Service Reform act, which passed Congress in 1978. President Carter, as you quote him, he says to Congress, the civil service system has become a bureaucratic maze which neglects merit, tolerates poor performance, permits abuse of legitimate employee rights, and mires every personnel action in red tape, delay, and confusion. Right. That's a Democratic president saying that is just really striking to me that you don't have this obvious partisan leaning on should the civil service function better, should you be able to hire better talent and fire worse talent more easily? It's not the polarized topic that it is today.
- [11:56]
B
No, it's absolutely. And Carter was a big civil service reformer in Georgia before those even larger civil service reforms that I mentioned in the 1990s. This was kind of shockingly one of the big parts of his early presidency that he both campaigned on and thought was essential to the success of his presidency. So, yeah, there wasn't the same division on the civil service that there is today. But, you know, I think you are seeing little sprouts, at least, of potential bipartisanship, you know, like the chance to compete, act at the end of 2024 and some of the potential reforms that Obama did to the hiring process, there's options for bipartisanship at the federal level, even if it's going to be nothing approaching what the states have done, in which I think is generally been successful.
- [12:42]
A
Well, let's talk about the federal level a little bit. And I want to do this by just walking through what the hiring process might actually be. So let's say you're looking to hire in some federal agency. You pick your agency. But I graduated college recently and I want to go into the civil service. So I'm. I'm on the outside of this process looking in, you're on the inside looking out. Tell me about trying to hire somebody like me. Like what? What's your first step?
- [13:07]
B
Well, it's interesting you bring up the college graduate because that is one recent reform that's happened. President Trump put out an executive order trying to counsel agencies to remove college degrees as a requirement for job posting. And this is another one of those examples that happened. A lot of states first, it's gone places like Maryland, and that's also been bipartisan, that this requirement for a college degree, which was used as a very kind of unfortunate proxy for ability and a lot of these jobs is now being removed. Now, it's not across the whole federal government. There's still job postings that require higher education degrees, but that's something that's changed. But anyway, more specifically into your question, so the Department of Transportation, let's say, which is. I like that because that's one of the more kind of bipartisan one. Department of Defense, va they tend to be a little more Republican. Hhs, some other agencies, they tend to be pretty Democrat. DOT is somewhere kind of in the middle. So we have a nice bipartisan agency to discuss hiring. And you as a manager try to craft a job description in a posting to go up on USA Jobs website.
- [14:16]
A
Where basically all federal job postings go.
- [14:18]
B
This all federal job postings go. I remember when they created back in 1990, that was supposedly a big massive reform to federal hiring, that you had this website where people could submit their resumes and so forth. And that one of the slightly different aspects of hiring at that point from the private sector is that first those resumes and applications go to usually an HR specialist. So the human resource specialist reviews everything and starts to rank people into different categories.
- [14:49]
A
Based on what?
- [14:50]
B
Based on a lot of weird things. On one level, it's supposed to be knowledge, skills and abilities, your KSAs or competencies, your three main things. And to some extent, again, this is a big step up from historical practice where you had frankly an absurd civil service exam where people had to fill out questions about say general Grant or about US code title 42 or whatever it was and then submitted off and someone rated the civil service exam and then the top three were eligible for the job. So we have this newer, frankly better system where we rank on knowledge, skills and abilities, we rank on competencies, and these HR professionals put people into different categories. Now one of the semi awkward ways they do this is by merely scanning the resumes and applications for keywords. If it's computer job, make sure you say the word computer somewhere in your resume, which would seem straightforward. But let's make sure you say manager or something. If it's a manager managerial job.
- [15:48]
A
Just to be clear, this is entirely literal. You're saying there's like a keyword search.
- [15:53]
B
And folks there is dinged and there's been pushback on this to try and you know, I've always wondered like, how common is this? It's sometimes hard to know what happens in the black box and these federal HR departments. But I actually saw some HR official quoted recently says, well, if I'm not allowed to do keyword searches, I'm going to take 15 years to overlook all the applications. So I got to do keyword searches. So yeah, they do the keyword search, I assume just a good old control F and look down and make sure people have this. And if they don't have the keywords into the circular file as they used to say, it goes into the garbage can. Then they just start ranking basically people and their abilities into these different, often three different categories. And again, that's often just where you say you're exceptional on something as an applicant. And that is also very literal. If you put in the little word bubble on the application, I am an exceptional manager. You get pushed on into the next level of the competition. If you say I'm pretty good, but I'm not the best, into the circular file you go again, this is another.
- [16:55]
A
Thing that I've become inured to. You know, I've developed like a thick skin. I'm not phased by this stuff. But if you're new to the whole question of like how does hiring happen at the federal level? I think this is pretty shocking, right, that like we ask you for a self assessment and if you just check, you know, I'm 10 out of 10 on everything you're asking me, that improves my odds, you know, mechanically of being hired. No matter what the question of it says, yes, I'm like one in a million on every skill you're asking about.
- [17:22]
B
Then that that's going to immensely improve your odds. And similar to the keyword search, you know, there's been pushback on this in recent years. And I'm definitely not going to say it's universal anymore. It's rarer than it used to be. But that's still a very common process that's going on right now. So the historical civil service system used to operate on a rule of three in places like New York. It still operates that, which is that the top three candidates on the test or whatever the evaluation system were get presented to the manager and the manager has to approve one of those for the position. And it's not too dissimilar today, thanks partially to reforms in the Obama administration in 2010. They have this category rating system where the best qualified or the very qualified get put into a big bucket together. And those the people that the actual person doing the hiring gets to see and evaluate and decide who he wants to hire. There's some restrictions on that. Like it has to be if a veteran outranks everybody else, you got to pick the veteran. The veteran also gets points for which category they're going into on these boxes.
- [18:23]
A
Veterans preference for those veterans unfamiliar.
- [18:26]
B
That was an issue in the states too, and some of their civil service reforms. How do we keep veterans preference? And basically the state said, you know, we're just going to encourage a veteran's preference. We don't need a formalized system to say they get X number of points and have to be in Y category. We're just going to say try to hire veterans. So that is possible without the formal system. Despite what some opponents of reform may claim, some of the particular problems here are just the nature of the people doing the hiring. Sometimes you see good managers to encourage them and the HR departments to look into a broader set of issues. But to my mind, one of the bigger problems is that they keep the HR kind of evaluation system divorced from the actual manager that's doing the hiring. And I mentioned my report. David Shulkin, who was the head of the va, wrote a great book on it shouldn't be this hard to serve your country. He was a health care exec and VA is mainly some extent a healthcare agency. And he would tell people, oh, you should, you should work for me. And they would send their applications out into the, the HR void and he'd never see them again because he wouldn't know they would get blocked at some point in this HR evaluation process and he'd be sent people with no health care experience because for whatever reason, they, they did well in the ranking. So, you know, I think one of the very base level reforms should be how can we more clearly integrate the hiring manager with the evaluation process? And again, to some extent, they tried to do this with this chance to compete act at the end of 2024, which was bipartisan and said you should have subject matter experts that are part of crafting the description of the job, that are part of evaluating and so forth. But that's still a long kind of road to go.
- [20:05]
A
Totally is the reason that we have often that firewall where the person who wants to hire doesn't actually get to look at the process until the end. Does that exist originally just out of these concerns about cronyism? It kind of motivates the whole initial concept of this professional civil service. Or is there another reason for that stuff?
- [20:22]
B
Yeah, one of the interesting things about the civil service is kind of an official modus for vende. Its reason for being is supposedly for a single clear purpose, to prevent politicized hiring and patronage from entering the government service. That goes back to the Pendleton Civil Service act of 1883. But to some extent, to my mind, it's always been a little strange that you have all of these very complex rules about every step of the process, from hiring down to firing, to promotion and everything in between about how to prevent political influence. And my mind is like, well, we could just focus on preventing political influence and not make sure that every step of the process is regulated on the off chance that without a clear regulation, political influence could creep in. So, yes, so this division is part of the general concern. Again, there are areas where I've heard HR specialists say, hey, we're involved. We declare that a manager is a subject matter expert, and then we bring them into the process early on. We can do that. But still, the division is pretty stark. And it's based on this kind of, to my mind, excessive concern about patronage.
- [21:29]
A
Totally. I mean, at one point you flag in this paper the. The Office of Personnel Management opm, which, you know, as you might expect from the name, is like the. The body that thinks about personnel in the federal government. It has like a 300 page regulatory document for agencies on how you have to hire. So the amount of process that exists is just remarkable.
- [21:50]
B
Yeah, and that's. I mean, again, this is maybe a theme we're already hitting on, but to my mind, that is impressive in that It's a big change from the Federal Personnel Manual, which was the 10,000 page document that we basically shredded in the 1990s. So basically what happened is that the OPM gave the agencies what's called delegated examining authorities as you agency have power to decide who to hire. We're not going to do the central supervision anymore. But, but, but, and this is to your point, but here's the 300 page document that dictates exactly how you have to carry out that hiring. And so to some extent you have decentralization, which to my mind is one of the real goals of civil service reform, allowing managers more authority to control their own departments. But another level, this, by this two level oversight, a local kind of HR department that ultimately being overseen by the OPM also leads to a lot of kind of slip Twix, the cup and the lips in terms of how something gets implemented. If you're in the agency and you're concerned about the OPM overseeing your process, maybe you're likely to be much more careful than you would actually like to be about following all these process. Yes, it's delegated to me, but ultimately I know I have to answer to OPM about this stuff. I'm just going to color right within the lines. And to the state level example, I often cite Texas, which has no central HR office, which again pretty radical from a federal perspective. There is just no office. Each agency decides kind of how it wants to hire. And a lot of these reform states, what really happened is that if there is a central personnel office, it's kind of a information clearinghouse slash reservoir of models. Hey, you can use us, the central HR office as a resource. If you want us to help you post the job, if you want us to help evaluate it, if you want us to help manage your processes, but you don't have to. And to my mind that's kind of the goal that we should be striving for in a lot of the federal reforms of just making OPM just kind of a resource for the managers in the individual departments to do their thing or you know, go independent.
- [23:49]
A
So let's say I somehow get through this hiring process, I get the job offer from the Department of Transportation, you offer me the job, talk to me about what you're paying me, how that's being decided, that whole process.
- [24:01]
B
So this is one of the more stultified aspects of the federal civil service system. So they have another multi hundred page handbook coming out of OPM called the Handbook of Occupational Groups and Families. So inside that you got 49 different groups and families. This is something like clerical occupations. And inside those 49 groups are a bunch of series, sometimes dozens within one of those groups, series of jobs, computer operator. And then inside those series they have independent documents, often dozens of pages long, saying classes of positions. And then you as a manager evaluate these nine factors which can each give points to each position which decides how you get slotted. And these weird GS schedule system of.
- [24:47]
A
The, like Linnaean, you know, family, genus, species stuff for.
- [24:51]
B
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, animals. There's lots of weird, there's worlds within worlds here. And again, to some extent this is improved. Before you used to have the old civil Service commission which was going around and kind of staring very closely at someone over their typewriter and saying, no, I think you should be a GS12, not a GS11, because someone over in the Department of Defense who does your same job is a GS12 or so forth. But this is delegated. But the agencies again have to listen to the OPM on how to classify these things and set their jobs into this 15 stage GS classification level system with, in which each of those GS15s are 10 steps, which, you know, that's, that also determines your pay and that's determined by mainly your seniority. So it's a pretty formalized step by step system mainly or overwhelmingly based on just how long you've sat in your desk.
- [25:40]
A
So let's be, let's be really optimistic about my performance and say like over my first three years I'm just hitting it out of the park. I'm like the model civil servant. Can you give me a raise? Like what can you do for me to keep me in that role?
- [25:52]
B
Not too, not too much. For most people, the 10 steps inside each of your GSA level is basically just set by seniority. How long you set. Now there are these quality step increases you can get, but they're very rare and they have to be documented. So you could hypothetically pay someone more, but it's going to be tough. And in general the managers just prefer just to stick to the seniority because not sticking to it garners a lot of complaints. And like so much else, the goal here is, hey, we don't want someone rewarding an official because they happen to share their political preferences. And so the result of that concern is basically nobody can get rewarded at all, which is very unfortunate. Now we do have again examples both in the state and the federal government of what's known as broadbanding, where you have very broad pay scales that the manager can Decide where to slot someone in, even inside their job. So you're computer operator, which can mean any, anything from someone who knows what an Excel spreadsheet is to someone who's programmed in the most advanced AI systems and say in South Carolina and four of these other places, as a manager you have a lot of discretion to kind of say, hey, computer manager, I can set you 20, 30, 40, 50% above the market rate of what this job technically would go for if I think you're doing a really great job. And that's just very rare at the federal level. To some extent they've done broadband at the gao, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, there's a famous experiment known as the China Lake Experiment for scientists out in California that gave managers a lot more expression to award scientists, but that's definitely the exception. So in general it's a really stepwise seniority based system.
- [27:32]
A
So just to throw another prompt out here, what if you want to bring me into the Senior Executive Service, the ses. So theoretically that sits on the top of the general service scale. It's on top of that system that has the really rigid series and families and groups for pay. Can't you bump me up in there and pay me what you owe me?
- [27:51]
B
Yeah, so I, I could hypothetically as a dot manager or as a political official or as another senior executive servant. And so this was created in the 1978 Civil Service Reform act, the Senior Executive Service. And the idea was we're going to have this kind of elite cadre at the top of the federal government with both going to be higher risk and higher reward. And that, hey, we're actually going to establish discipline for people in the Senior Executive Service. You might actually be fired. And we're going to give them higher pay to compensate for that. Almost immediately that did not work out. Congress was outraged at the higher pay given to the top officials and they capped it. And ever since, it's been tightly controlled how much the Senior Executive Service can get paid. And generally the assumption, as in most of the rest of the federal government, where they establish these performance pay incentives are bonuses, which again do actually exist. And to some extent throughout the federal government, they just kind of spread them like peanut butter over the whole service that just everyone gets a little bit one year and then are every two or three years, so there's not complaints. And that's, that's basically what happened to the SES. But the SES is the top tier of the civil service, about 8,000 individuals. And their annual pay is, is Kind of capped at the Vice President's salary, which is a cap for a lot of people in the federal government in general. For most of your GS and other executives go. It's actually Congress's salary. The count for, for the really high paid ones. It's the Vice President, it's the vp. Yeah, yeah, I was joking with. I think I forget I was talking with you for a while. The highest paid person in the federal government was the Navy football coach who earned multiples, I think an order of, by far. Yeah, an order of magnitude more than the U.S. president. It was five, six million dollars or whatever. That's similar actually to the states too. If you look at the, if they include them, the top ranked person consistently.
- [29:37]
A
It's like the, it's the Alabama coach.
- [29:39]
B
It'S the football coach or the basketball coach, one or the other. And that's still, that's true that the federal government as well, but they create special exceptions for football coaches because, you know, they'll starve on less than a million a year. Right.
- [29:51]
A
That's right. I wonder how far you could get with a bill to just benchmark instead of the Vice President, we're going to benchmark the highest salary to, you know, really the most important job in the federal government, which is, you know, the.
- [30:01]
B
Army coach, which is the football coaches. Yeah. You know, once you conceive it in that sort of terms, yeah, you could do a lot. And I mean, this might be a good thing to bring up, which I think is one of the big problems with pay and the federal government in particular. But government writ large, which is pay compression or wage compression, this is a kind of consistent finding across all kinds of government civil service systems that the highest skilled people tend to be paid much less than the private sector and the lowest paid people tend to get paid much more. And the kind of political science reason for that is pretty simple, that the median voter in America still kind of decides what seems reasonable. And to the median voter in America, the average salary of a gender looks really low and the average salary of a scientist looks way, way too high. So you have this tendency to pay compression. It's very clear at the federal level and that the studies show your average federal employee is probably overpaid relative to the private sector. But that's a lot because the lowest skilled employees are paid way higher, up to 40% higher than the private sector equivalent. And the highest paid employees, the postgraduate skilled professionals, are paid less. So that pay compression makes it really hard to recruit the top performers, but it also just swells the wage budget in a way that makes it difficult to talk about kind of reform.
- [31:20]
A
Right. Well, let me ask you, looking ahead, I think there's a lot of interest in this admin in the hiring and firing side of what you've been talking about, making it easier to get rid of underperformers. There's been real aggressive pushes to limit collective bargaining in the public sector. So, on the one hand, all that stuff should theoretically make it easier to recruit, but it also increases the. The precariousness of civil service rules. And obviously, we've seen huge amounts of firings in the civil service over the last six months. And classically, the explicit trade off of working in the federal government was your pay is going to be capped. You're not going to make, you know, at the higher levels what you'd make in the private sector, but you have this job for life if you want it. Basically, you know, it's impossible to get rid of you. And so you trade some lifetime earnings for stability. In a world where we reduce the stability, but we can't bump up the amount that we pay you, Congress doesn't actually bump that up so that you can make a quarter of what the Navy coach makes. If you're really excellent. That isn't the net effect to drive talent away from the civil service. Like, how do you stop that from being a net negative trade?
- [32:30]
B
Yeah, I think it's a real concern now. On one level, it should be ameliorated because those who are most concerned with stability of employment do tend to be lower performers. So if you have people who are leaving the federal service because all they want is stability and they're not getting that anymore, that may not be a net loss. As someone who came out of academia and knows the wonder of effective lifetime annuities in that world, there can be very high performers who like that stability, who therefore can take a lower salary on that. And yes, without the ability to bump those that pay up more, it's going to be a real issue. Now, I do know the Trump administration has at least internally made some kind of signs they're open to reforms and say the top tiers of the Senior Executive Service and other parts of the federal government, that they would be willing to have people get paid more at that level, compensate for the increased risk. That has certainly come on since the Trump administration came in. But when you look at the removals, the reductions in forces that have happened under Trump, they are overwhelmingly among probationary employees, which means it. It is the lower level employees on.
- [33:44]
A
The whole, with some exceptions. Right. If you, if you've been promoted recently, often you can get reclassed as a probationary employee.
- [33:51]
B
Yeah, you can get reclasses.
- [33:52]
A
So there's some high performers who get, then get lumped into the probation.
- [33:54]
B
No, absolutely. And so, you know, that is an issue. And I think to some extent the issue has been exacerbated precisely because of the reductions in force regulations that are in place which have made the firings particularly damaging, which if you had more streamlined reductions in force system, which they do have in the states where many states where seniority is not the main determinant of who gets laid off, you could have a system where these reductions in force could actually be removing the lower performing civil servants and keeping the higher performing ones and giving them some amount of confidence their tenure. So, no, unfortunately, the combination of the large scale removals with the existing reductions in force regs, which are very stringent, has really demoralized some of the upper levels of the federal government. And I share that concern about that there. But I might even add too, it is interesting if you look at the federal government's own figures on the total civil service workforce and they have reduced, gone down significantly since Trump came in office, but it's I think less than 100,000 still in the most recent numbers that I've seen. So this, I'm not sure how much trust those versus some of these other numbers where you've seen where people have said 150,000, 200,000 Etc.
- [35:07]
A
Right. And some of it's dependent on court cases that are going to make or break hiring, whether, whether big swaths of people get fired.
- [35:14]
B
Yeah, yeah. And maybe just to clarify one issue here to some extent, I think the issue of whether the Trump administration or future administration can remove large numbers of people from the civil service should be somewhat divorced from the general conversation on civil service reform. Because the main debate about whether or not Trump can do this really centers around how much power does the appropriators in Congress have to determine the total amount of spending in particular agencies on their workforce. And it does not depend necessarily on, hey, if we're going to remove people, whether for a general layoffs or reductions in force or because of particular performance issues, how can we go about doing that? You know, my kind of last ditch hope to maintain, you know, a bipartisan possibility of civil service reform is to say we can bracket that issue of how much power does the president have to remove or limit the workforce in general from okay, if he is going to have that Power, or if he isn't, how can he go about hiring and firing, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I think those can be distinct issues.
- [36:17]
A
I do sympathize, and I think a lot of these questions in the second bucket about making it easier for whoever the president is to identify and remove poor performers. If we did that, I think that's a tool that any future administration would like to have.
- [36:32]
B
Yeah. And it's interesting to me because we had, obviously this conversation really sparked again with the fire of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a commissioner. But as I sometimes point out to people, that was a position Congress set up to be removable by the President, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. So, you know, again, that is to some extent a separate issue from civil service writ large. You have this position that everyone said, okay, we want the president to be able to hire and fire. Maybe that was a bad decision. But, you know, that's the situation today.
- [37:03]
A
Totally. Well, let's talk about firings because as you pointed out, reductions in force or rifts are these kind of broad, you know, reductions in force. And there's a lot of restrictions on how you can do that. And attentive listeners to statecraft will know we've been pretty critical, like you have, of the regulations that say you have to go in order of seniority. A lot of the young, talented people you have to fire if you're doing rifts. But let's turn it around. I've been a terrible civil servant. I've been just like a nightmarish employee from day one. And you want to discipline or remove me or suspend me or fire me, what are your options? You just want to get rid of me, particularly because I'm just a total blight to the office.
- [37:40]
B
Yeah. And just to set the stage for this, too, anybody who has talked with people who've worked in the civil service know it's hard to fire bad performers, like, with whatever their political valence, whatever they feel about the civil service system writ large. They have some horror stories about a person who just couldn't be removed, no matter how difficult it was. One of my favorite stories, actually concerned in the early 2000 and tens, there was a spate of stories coming out about air traffic controllers who were asleep on the job. And then Transportation Secretary. Good for our hypothetical, Ray LaHoods made a big public announcement. I'm going to fire these three guys who were asleep at their job. And it turned out he only was able to remove one of them after these big announcements. One Retired and another had their firing basically reduced to a suspension. You had another horrific story also in the air traffic control where a man was joking on the phone with friends when a plane crashed into a helicopter and killed nine people over the Hudson River. And again, a national outcry said, we're going to fire this guy. And then it turned out, no, in the end, after going through the process, he only got suspension. So everyone agrees it's too hard. And the basic story is you have two ways to fire someone. Chapter 75, which was the old way, which is often considered kind of the realm of misconduct, you've stolen something from the office, you punch your colleague in the face during a dispute about the coffee, whatever it was like this is something illegal or just straight out wrong, we get you out of under Chapter 75. But then the, the 1978 Civil Service Reform act added Chapter 43, which is supposed to be the kind of performance based system to remove someone. And the hope was, again, like so much of that Civil Service Reform act, with people who passed it, who really thought this might be the beginning of an entirely different system, was this would make it much quicker. And in the end, a lot of federal managers say there's not a huge amount of difference between the two. Some use 75, some use 43. If you do 43, you have to document very clearly what the person did wrong. You have to put them on performance improvement plan. If they fail the performance improvement plan after a certain amount of time, they can respond to any claims about what they did wrong. And then they can take that process up to the Merit Systems Protection Board and claim that they were incorrectly fired or the processes weren't carried out appropriately. And then if they want to, they could take it up to the federal courts and also complain there.
- [40:17]
A
Sorry, just to be clear, after I go through the kind of, there's a specific board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, that will adjudicate whether my filing was fair. And after that I can go take it to the courts.
- [40:27]
B
Yeah, you can, you can go, go through the MSPB and then go up and say, no, I don't like the, the order they got. Let me go to the courts. And right now the MSPB doesn't have a full quorum. And so this is actually complicated in some of the recent removal disputes. But you have this incredibly difficult process which again, unlike the, the private sector, where your boss looks at you and says, I don't like how you're giving me the stink guy today, out you go. And, you know, one can Say that's good or bad. But in the whole, you know, I think the model should be closer to the private sector. We should trust managers in the whole to, to do their job without excessive oversight and process. And that's clearly about as far from the realm possibility as the current system which, you know, the estimate six to months to a year to fire a very bad performer. The number of people who win at the Merit System Protection board is still 20 to 30%. But this goes into another issue which I assume we'll talk about soon, which is the, the unionization aspects of firing. So if you're part of a collective bargaining agreement which is actually most of the regular federal civil service, first you have to go through this arbitration grievance procedure. And those are even more, I think you're about 50, 50 to win on those. If your boss tries to remove you. This independent union based arbitration system.
- [41:44]
A
So you're trying to get rid of me and I'm in the union, we go through that arbitration agreement system, you win or the roadblocks are cleared. And then I can take it to the Merit Systems Protection Board and then you win again. I can still take it to the federal courts.
- [41:59]
B
You can take it onwards. You can take it onwards. And so you can file different sorts of claims on chapter 43. It's really only supposed to be about the Merit System Protection Board is really supposed to be about the process, not the evidence. And you just have to show it 75 it's really more about the manager has to show by preponderance of the evidence. And then there's different standards for what you take to the courts and then different standards according to each collective bargaining agreement about what the grievance procedure should be when someone is disciplined. So yes, very complicated abstruse and procedural heavy process that makes it very difficult to move people, which is why the involuntary separation rate at the federal government, most governments is many multiples lower than the private sector.
- [42:41]
A
So in practice you would love to get me off your team because I'm just abysmal. But you have no stomach for going through this whole process. And you know, I'm going to fight it. You know, I'm ornery and contrarian and I'm going to stick my heels in and waste years of your time. What do managers in the federal government do with their poor performance in practice?
- [43:02]
B
So I mean, you know, I always heard about this growing up and there's the windowless office in the basement without a phone or now an Internet connection where you know, you just, you Place someone down there, hope they get the message, and sooner or later they leave. But you know, as I pointed out, there's plenty of people in America. That's the dream job. You got a, you got a windowless office, you just get to sit and nobody bothers you for eight hours. You need to punch in at nine and punch out at five and then that's your day. Oh great, I'll collect that salary for another 10 years. So, you know, you can try to push people around. Depending if a job changes in motion, you can protest that certainly. So it's not just firing, but generally you just try to make life unpleasant for that person. And this is kind of to the point that I was discussing before about even in a formal civil service system, there's no way to totally exclude kind of political influence or manager power outside the formal process. There just isn't. People who are different types of political appointees will kind of promote and evaluate people well, if they are doing the thing they want to do and they won't if they are maybe opposed to their politics or something else. Even in the existing system, there's no way to completely remove politics. And even in the existing system there's a lot of ways to punish bad performers that are not the typical grievance process subject issues or so forth.
- [44:22]
A
Right. You mentioned public sector collective bargaining a moment ago. I want to move on to that because one of the things that was really striking was just from reading you, public sector collective bargaining in the US is really new. Like a lot of the other features of what I kind of tend to think of as like just how the civil service works. But until about 50 years ago, there was no collective bargaining in the public sector.
- [44:47]
B
Yeah, the state level, it really started with Wisconsin at the end of the 1950s. And in 62 act there was the famous local government reforms, beginning with what's known as the Little Wagner act in New York City, where Robert Wagner's son, Robert Wagner had been this US Senator who created the National Labor Relations Board and the private sector unionization. His son as mayor of New York created kind of the first collective bargaining system at the local level in the US in New York City in the 60s. So John F. Kennedy in 62 issued an executive order, said we're going to deal officially with unions, we're going to have these negotiations. But it was all kind of informal and non statutory. But then it wasn't until Title vii of the 1978 Civil Service Reform act that unions really had a formal statutory role in our federal service System like this is shockingly new. And to some extent, that was the great loss to many of the civil service reformers who were pushing for that act in 78. They really wanted to get through a lot of these other big reforms about hiring and firing and so forth, but they gave up on the unions to try to get those. And some people kind of think that that exception swallowed the rest of the rules and that the union power that was garnered in 78 really overcame a lot of the other reforms that people hope to accomplish there. And soon. You had the majority of the federal workforce subject to collective bargaining, but that's changing now, too. So the Trump administration had there is a part of that civil service reform act that said if your position is in a national security related position, the president can determine it's not subject to collective bargaining. And Trump and the Opium has basically said most of the positions in the federal government are national security related positions and therefore we're going to declare them off limits to collective bargaining. Now, for some people say that's like, oh, that sounds absurd to me, but I remind people 60% of the federal workforce, the civil service workforce is Department of Defense, Veteran affairs and Department of homeland security. That's 60% right there. And that's also worth remembering too, when people talk about, like federal bureaucrats and federal civil servants. Like, I, I obviously am not someone who goes too easy on this crowd and think there's a heck of a lot that needs to be reformed there. But for the Republican side of this, your majority of your civil service workforce are in these three agencies the Republicans do tend to like a lot. But so that also means that, hey, when you're talking about unions, those Veterans Affairs, a little bit more of an open question, but we actually have some particular laws there about opening up process in the veteran administration after the scandals in 2010s about waiting lists and hospitals.
- [47:24]
A
And so forth, which just to clarify for listeners who, like me, may have been only coming of age during that period, a bunch of Veterans affairs employees were falsifying the numbers on waiting lists to get into VA hospitals. And I believe 40 people died on those waiting lists.
- [47:41]
B
Yeah, I forget the exact number, but yeah, you had a lot of veterans hospitals were saying, hey, we're meeting these standards for getting veterans in the door for these waiting lists, but actually they were straight up lying about those standards. And yes, many people who are on these lists waiting for months and months to see a doctor died in the interim, some from causes that I think most people agree could have been treated if they had seen a Veteran affairs doctor. So, yeah. And that led to Congress in 2014 and 17 to doing big reforms in the VA precisely because everyone realized, like, hey, this is a real problem. If you're having a civil servant who's preventing people from seeing a doctor when they should, we should be able to remove that person. And again, to my mind, like, when you hear some of these stories about air traffic control, people falling asleep, being drunk in the job, crashing planes together without overseeing the flights, yeah, that seems like the sort of person we really need to be able to fire. But at least the VA that led to reforms. So Trump has put out these executive orders on we're going to stop collective bargaining with all of these agencies and national security positions and some of those, like the epa. That seems like a sell everything, everything's national security. I guess that, you know, dig a mine and the Chinese are trying to dig their own mine and we want the mine to go quick. Okay. Without the EPA petty fogging it maybe. But the core ones I think are pretty solid. And so far the courts have upheld it, or at least the existing executive order to go in place. So that could really be reformed. But in the rest of the federal government, there's these very extreme long collective bargaining agreements between agencies and their unions. I've hit on the Transportation Security Administration as one that's had pretty extensive bargaining with their union. And it was when we created the TSA to supervise airport security, a lot of people said, like, we need a creme de la creme to supervise airports. After 9, 11, we're really going to look in this, and we want to keep this out of union hands, precise, because we know unions are going to make it difficult to move people around. But the Obama administration said, nope, we're going to negotiate with the union. And now you have these huge negotiations, the unions about parking spots and hours of employment and uniforms and everything under the sun. That makes it really hard for managers in the TSA to do their job and decide when people should go where or what they should do.
- [49:59]
A
Right. So one of the things that we've talked about on here in past episodes, for instance, with John Kamensky, who was a pivotal figure in the Clinton Gore government reforms broadly, was this relationship between full time government employees and this kind of what they call the Beltway bandits, the contractors who in a lot of cases do jobs that you might think of as civil service jobs. One of the critiques of that reinventing government push that Clinton and Gore did in the 90s was they did shrink formally the size on paper of the civil service, but the number of contractors employed by federal government ballooned dramatically to fill that void. And so in the end, it's actually hard to say that you actually reduced the total number of people working for the federal government being paid by the federal government. Talk to me a little bit about the relationship between the civil service reform stuff that you'd like to see on the one hand and this army of folks who are not formally employees of the federal government, but in practice are on the other hand.
- [50:57]
B
Yeah, it's interesting, some civil servant I think pointed this out that every government service is actually a combination of some amount of public employees and public inputs and private inputs and private employees. Like there's never a single thing government does, federal, state or local that doesn't involve inputs from the private sector. And that could be as simple as, you know, it's the uniforms for the janitors. Or it could be even if you have a publicly employed janitor who buys the mop, you're not making the mops in a federal manufacturer who sets the terms for this and so forth. So there's always a need to synchronize these two different aspects of government service. And yes, to some extent I understand the critique that the excessive focus perhaps on full time employees in the 1990s led to contracting out of some positions that could be done directly by the government. But I think that does miss how much of the government can and should be contracted out. Like the basic OMB statute of defining what is an essential government duty should still be the dividing line. What does the government have to do? Because that is the public overseeing a process versus what can the private sector just do itself? I always cite this is a little more appropriate for the state and local level. But Stephen Goldsmith, the old mayor of Indianapolis, proposed what he called the Yellow Pages test. And he said if you open the yellow pages and there's three businesses in there doing that business, the government should not be in that business. There's three garbage haulers out there. Instead of having a formal government garbage hauling department, just contract out the garbage. And obviously today with the Internet you should have a lot more opportunities to contract stuff out. I think that is generally good. And we should not have the federal government kind of going about a lot of the day to day procedural things that really don't require public input. Now I think what a lot of people didn't recognize is how much pressure though that's going to put on government contracting officers cos at the federal level, by some estimates there's about 40,000, or at least last time I checked, 40,000 government contracting officers that have a lot of power. The most recent year just came out that was $750 billion in federal contracts. So this is a substantial part of our whole economy. And if you total state and local, now we're talking almost 10% of our whole economy goes through government contracts. Like this is kind of mind boggling to think about. Like, often throw this number out there to think we should all be spending in the public policy world probably about 10% of our time. Thinking about contracting like this is really.
- [53:30]
A
Really huge music to my ears. Judge.
- [53:33]
B
Yeah, exactly. I know, I know you if anybody has been a lot of work trying to get the message out there on this. Now, one of the things I think everyone recognized is that contractors should have more authority. And some of the reforms that happened with people like Kelman, who was the Office of Federal Procurement policy in the 90s had under Clinton was that, hey, we just need to give a lot more authority, these people to just take a credit card and go out and buy, you know, a sheaf of paper if that's what they need. And we need more authority to get these bids out appropriately. So one of the reforms I don't think has been appreciated in a lot of these discussions is in 1995, the federal government did an acquisition demo that gave a lot more pay discretion to managers supervising contracting officers and people working in contracting for the Department of Defense, where most of this contract actually happens. And there's been some evaluations of that that have been generally positive. It's not like kind of the extreme broadband scale of what happens at South Carolina or Florida, but there's a little more discretion in this contracting workforce to give them a little more money and authority and so forth. But I think the same message that animates civil service reform should animate a lot of these contracting discussions is that the goal should be setting clear goals that you want for either a civil servant or for a contractor and then giving that person or contractor the discretion to meet them. And if you, in one sense, if you make the civil service more stultified, you're going to have to contract stuff out. If you make the civil service pay compression free, you're going to contract more stuff out. Like people talk about the general schedule, but we haven't talked about the federal wage schedule system at all, which is the blue collar federal system, which encompasses about 200,000 federal employees. And pay compression means those guys get paid really, really well. And that means some managers Inside the federal agencies rightfully think like, well, you know, maybe I'd like to have a full time supervision over some individual, but I would rather contract it out because I can get it a heck of a lot cheaper. And so I think there's a continuous relationship this if we make the civil service more stultified, we're going to push contracting out into more and more areas where maybe it wouldn't be appropriate. But in the end we have to remember a lot of things are going to be appropriate to contract out. That just means we need to also give contracting officers and the people overseeing contracts a lot of discretion, a lot of ability to carry out their missions and not a lot of oversight from say GAO or the courts or so forth about their bids. Just like we shouldn't give OPM a kind of input into the civil service hiring process.
- [56:06]
A
Totally. This is one of those things that I think we keep harping on, on statecraft that I think is counterintuitive from a reformer's perspective that if you want a lot of these processes to function better, you're going to have to stop nitpicking and poking them so much. You're going to have to ease up on the throttle a little bit and let folks make their own decisions, even when sometimes you're not going to agree with them.
- [56:28]
B
Yeah, this is a tension that's obviously happening in this administration. You've seen some clear interest in decentralization and you've seen some centralization. I mean to my mind, in both the contracting civil service sphere, the goal for the kind of central agencies should be giving as many options as possible to the local managers, making sure they don't go extremely off the rails, but then giving those local managers, contracting officials, the ability to make their own choices. Now the GSA under this administration is doing a lot of what are known as government wide acquisition contracts where hey, we establish a contract for the whole government in the General Service administration. And usually you local manager are not required to use that contract if you want computer services or whatever, but it's an option for you, we have it for you and you can take it. And I think that should be the similar thing with the OPM of hey, here's maybe the system we have set up, you can take that and use it as you want, it's here for you. But it doesn't have to be used because you might have very particular hiring decisions to make. And in the end, just like there shouldn't be one process that decides how we buy a sheaf of computer Paper and how we buy an aircraft carrier. There shouldn't be one hiring process and firing process for hiring a janitor and hiring a nuclear physicist like that. That can't be a centralized process because the very nature of human life is that there's an infinitude of possibilities that you need to allow for. And that means some amount of decentralization.
- [57:53]
A
Totally. I'll just say it's funny, we're on the contracting point. Yesterday I was having an argument with someone on Twitter, a friendly argument, but an argument about an example of this where New York state has a buy local requirement for the state for certain kinds of procurement contracts. So when they want to build these big public toilets in New York City, you have to source all the toilet parts from within the state, even if, as it turns out, you could in total get them for like $200,000 cheaper if you just source whatever the functional toilet part was from Portland, Oregon or whatever. And my argument was, you and I agree on this. It's crazy to try and make procurement and contracting solve all your problems about keeping a local toilet parts industry healthy. Like you just want to procure the toilet.
- [58:41]
B
Yeah. And this is another era where you see similar overlap in some of the civil service and the contracting issues is that a lot of cities have residency requirements for many of their positions. If you work for the city, you have to live inside the city. In New York, that means you got a lot of police officers living on Staten island or like right on the line of the north side of the Bronx where they're inches away from Westchester or some sort. And that drives up costs and limits your population of potential employees. And that's an issue at the same issue. One of the most amazing things to me about the Biden bipartisan infrastructure law was that they actually encourage contracting officers for that to use residency requirements and that like you should try to localize some of your hiring and contracting into certain areas. And on a national level, that of course cancels out. If both Wyoming and Wisconsin and Montana all use residency requirements, the net effect is going to be not more people hired from any one of those states, but just more mandates and more expense for any of the particular hiring and contracting. So yeah, it's so often the one expects the civil service and contracting to solve all of our ills and to be the sort of point the way forward for the rest of the economy and the private sector on what to go on. Discrimination, hiring, pay, et cetera. And that just leads to by definition, government being a lot more expensive than the private Sector.
- [59:57]
A
Right. Well, Judge, this has been great. Let me close with an ask for you. Over the next three and a half years, what would you like to see the admin do on civil service reform that they haven't already taken up? What is your extra push on them?
- [60:11]
B
Well, you know, I think some of the broad scale layoffs which seem to be slowing down were counterproductive, and I'll say that right here at the beginning. Now, I do think that their ability to achieve their ends was limited by the nature of the RIF regulations and some of these things which made them more counterproductive than they had to be. And that's the situation they inherited. But that didn't mean you had to lay off a lot of people without considering the particular jobs they were doing.
- [60:37]
A
And hiring quite a few of them back.
- [60:39]
B
And hiring quite a few of them back. There's also debates obviously within the administration between Doge and Russ Vaught and some of the others on this. But some of the things I think like the schedule policy career, which is the revival of the Schedule F in the first Trump administration, is largely a step in the right direction, which says, counter to some of the critics there, which says you can remove someone if they're in a policy making position, just like if they were completely at will. But that actually says you still have to hire from the typical civil service system. So for those concerned about politicization, that doesn't even impugn that because they can't just pick someone from the, you know, party system to put in there. So I think that's good. They recently had a suitability requirement rule that I think was a move in the right direction that says if someone's not suitable for the workforce, there are other ways to remove them besides the typical procedures. I mean, the ideal system, I think going to require some congressional input is to really have a decentralization of hiring authority to individual managers, which means the OPM really saying, you know, now under Scott Kapoor is I think recently been confirmed, right? I think, yeah, finally, finally been confirmed as the head of the opm. And to really say, hey, the OPM is here for you federal managers to assist you, make sure you stay within the broad kind of lanes of what the administration is trying to accomplish. But once we give you your kind of general goals, we're going to trust you to do that, including hiring, which I've mentioned it a few times, but I think the Chance to Compete act, which was mentioned in one of Trump's day one executive orders, people forget about this. Where he just talked about merit hiring on one of his January 20, 2025 executive orders. And part of that was saying implementing the Chance to Compete act to the maximum extent of the law, which was bringing more subject matter expertise into the hiring process, allowing more discretion for managers and hiring and input into the hiring process. And I think hearing that out, which was, again, a bipartisan reform, is going to be a big step, but it's going to take a lot more work.
- [62:35]
A
Totally. Well, I hope you are around for it. Judge, thank you for joining.
- [62:39]
B
Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure. Santi, one of my favorite shows, so love to be on it.
- [62:43]
A
That's good to hear. Sam.